Interview with Author and Journalist Erik Rush

September 20, 2010

Recently AIM talked to Erik Rush about his controversial new book, Negrophilia. It was Erik Rush whose work put Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s pastor of 20 years, into the forefront of media debate during the 2008 Presidential elections. Erik writes for WorldNetDaily, along with other print and online publications, and is the author of four books.

Erik was born in New York, the first child of a white father and black mother. For many years his family lived in the same neighborhood as Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, and her children. From 1975 to 1985, Erik worked as a studio, club, and stage musician, and in biomedical research. In 1986 he relocated to Colorado, and began writing award-winning short stories and novels. He is currently a contributor of social commentary to WorldNetDaily.

The interview was done late last month on Take AIM, AIM’s weekly show on BlogTalkRadio. You can listen to the complete interview or read the transcript here.

“There are a lot of people in the entertainment business who are, more or less, apolitical. They’re just too into themselves to really care about politics—and then there are a lot who are very progressive, and then that small percentage who are conservative but don’t really talk about it, but there are more that lean that way than, I think, most people know. So I had some friends that were very into politics, very well-read, and we would sit around, while people were partying up and what-have-you, in the corner and talk politics some of the time. And I was a Reagan supporter, and a lot of people thought that was crazy—especially black folks. Because Reagan was going to have us back on the plantation, don’t you know? I found that amusing. But that’s pretty much where I was.”

“It was in January or early February of 2007. I was approached by a Chicago-area journalist named Fran Eaton, who knew about Obama—and everybody knew that he was about to declare. Everyone in Chicago knew that he attended Trinity United Church. Of course, the more conservative people had more of a bead on what the church was about, and she had written a couple of pieces on it, but was somewhat frustrated, because it wasn’t getting any traction. So she approached me through a third party, and asked if I might be interested in looking into it, maybe writing about it. Which I did. I did my homework, and was duly appalled when I discovered the black liberation theology church, and what its background, essentially, was. So I wrote a column for the New Media Journal on the subject, and that got picked up by Sean Hannity, who was on Hannity & Colmes at the time, and the rest, as they say, was history.

“I think I might actually—and don’t hold me to this—but I might actually have been the first person to call Obama a liar on national television, because I said, on television, on Hannity & Colmes—that I thought that his claims, that he had never heard any of that stuff, was rubbish. Because you don’t sit in a church for 20 years, with somebody who has opinions that are that strong, and not hear anything that would give you that indication.

“As time has gone on, obviously, [Obama has] gotten the indication that the establishment press will carry as much water for him as he allows them to carry, so, I believe, he’s gotten bolder and bolder as far as the things that he figures he can get away with, in terms of his rhetoric and his actions. Because he’s not going to be called on anything by members of the establishment press. I think that, maybe, he perceived it as being a bit more of a problem early on. Case in point: He did, pretty much, throw Reverend Wright under the bus, or kick him to the curb, or however you want to put it, but then—and that was early on. I don’t know that he would have found it as necessary to do it now, if the issue had taken this long to come to the surface.”

“…the people who are advancing the idea that Islam has as much of a right to free speech as any other religion, and we have to give them all of this latitude, they’re not really out to destroy us, are—they either have a political imperative in doing so, or they’re just deluding themselves, because it is very apparent to me, and to a lot of other people—reformed Muslims would be the first among those—to say that there is no coexistence between Islam and non-Islamic societies. Despite the fact that you may have a moderate Muslim, you’re always going to get to a point where it reaches critical mass, the Muslims radicalize and try to take over, implement sharia law—which is antithetical to what America stands for, and to the Constitution. So you’ve really got a paradox going on when you try to integrate Islam, because it’s supposedly a religion—I think it’s more of a political system—that enjoys First Amendment protection, but then it’s going to neutralize the Constitution, and we can’t have that.”

“Come on: not being able to say—even say!—radical Islam is suicidal. We have this political system whereby these things are happening. We have people who are committing seditious acts. We need to start watching these radical Islamists. The Muslims who are moderate and don’t want to engage in these things—fine. The other ones are going to be watched the way that the FBI watches some of these white supremacist groups. Because they’re dangerous.”

“Well, the title [Negrophilia] is a word that has been sort of loosely thrown around before. The literal translation from Latin and Greek is into “Love of black, things black, or black people,” and the book analyzes that the aspect of that world view that the far Left has put across over the last few decades, that it deceives and misrepresents black Americans, demonizes white Americans, and advances the idea—excuse me—that we are still an institutionally racist nation, promoting white guilt, black anger and dissatisfaction, black dependency. And the kinds of things that we are seeing now in terms of the malaise that’s in the black community are things that I say are directly traceable to progressive policies, and some of the things that we’ve seen over the last few months, in terms of racial tensions ramping up—and everyone’s wondering why—is directly traceable to those same policies.”

“The Left has pretty much got the reins on the press, and a lot of the news bureau chiefs and the journalists are likeminded people who went to a lot of the same universities, they were schooled in hard Left journalism. They really have lost that concern for what the truth is, and they’re advancing an ideology which is not only a shame as far as the occupation of journalism goes, but it’s very dangerous for the United States. Consequently, they have been very amenable toward advancing progressivism, and—in part and parcel, negrophilia being part and parcel of that—it is a very superficial and somewhat juvenile world view.”